CloudStatus Monitors Amazon's Cloud

Users of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) utility computing platform may be interested in CloudStatus.com, which was just introduced at the O'Reilly Velocity conference. The free service, developed by Hyperic, offers detailed information about the status of each of the AWS services (S3, EC2, etc.) that goes beyond the basic "up or down" information provided by the Amazon Status Dashboard. The service is launching with support for Amazon, but says it will soon add tracking for Google App Engine and other popular cloud services.

CloudStatus is built on Hyperic HQ, the company's product for monitoring large scale web infrastructure. Here's a description of how they gather the data:

For each service, Hyperic is collecting specific metrics using production instances across the cloud and tailored exercises typical of each service. While the results cover activities accessed across the cloud from both inside and outside of the cloud, the service is not yet specific to individual instances for unique businesses. The results should be interpreted as an indication of general service levels, and point further investigation toward application behavior or cloud performance.

CloudStatus is one of many performance monitoring tools being launched or featured at Velocity. There currently is at least one provider, AWS Monitoring, offering paid monitoring of specific customer instances running on Amazon services.